Imaging the destruction of a rotating regular black hole

Abstract A regular black hole (BH), unconstrained by the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, can exceed its critical spin limit and transition into a superspinar. In this paper, we investigate the observational appearance of a rotating regular BH, specifically the Ghosh BH and its superspinar counterpart, when surrounded by a thin accretion disk. The resulting images reveal distinct features: the BH closely resembles its Kerr counterpart with slight deviations, while the superspinar configuration exhibits an inner photon ring structure. Furthermore, we investigate the image transition of the Ghosh BH that has recently been destroyed by a collapsing null shell carrying a specific angular momentum. The results indicate that, apart from a possible sudden burst of light, the inner photon ring undergoes gradual transitions over time, with the transition times depending on the additional angular momentum gained by the BH. Our findings also suggest that the transition timescale becomes significant for supermassive BHs, with masses at least less than about twice that of M87*.